Why are my SATA2 transfers so slow?

[Guest]

Hey all, First time posting on Tom's here. Best place to keep tabs on hardware and software issues for me

Anyways. I have a Samsung SATA2 640GB Hard Drive. It's a beast, and beautiful, extremely quiet.

However I'm getting extremely slow Transfer speeds reading and writing.

About 10-20MB/s, And I can't figure out why.

Anyone have any ideas why this could be? And how to fix it, possibly?

I'm running AHCI, Windows 7 pro, Core2Duo E8400 3.00Ghz, 4 GB Patriot DDR2/800 5-5-5-12 RAM 2x2048 Dual Channel.

 

[sminlal]

What are you doing that's giving these kinds of speeds?

Things that can slow down the transfer rate:

If you're transferring a lot of small files, you'll find the speeds are a lot slower than if you transfer just a few very large files.

If you're transferring to or from a slower device (a USB device, for example) then it will limit the transfer rate.

If you're transferring files from one place to another on the same drive, then speeds will be very slow because the head has to move back and forth. Note if you have two partitions (C: and D: for example) on the same drive, then transfers between them will also be much slower.

If there's other concurrent activity occurring on the source or target drive, that will also slow things down.

 

[Guest]

Ahh ok, That would explain it. Operating the transfers from one partition to another, I didn't think of that. lol.

Also, Running AHCI, is there anything I can set or enable/disable to increase data throughput to enhance my gaming speeds and stability?

 

[sminlal]

If your BIOS is configured so that the drive is running in AHCI mode, then that's all you need. The alternative, IDE Emulation Mode, doesn't support some performance enhancements that AHCI can do.